Dorothy Kosinski

Dorothy M. Kosinski is an American scholar of nineteenth and twentieth-century art and the director (since 2008) of The Phillips Collection, an art museum in Washington, D. C.

Kosinski grew up in Wallingford, Connecticut, and got her BA from Yale University and her MA and PhD degrees from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. After being an intern and curatorial assistant at the Guggenheim Museum, she became a curator for the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, and for the private collection of cubist art left by Douglas Cooper in Basel, Switzerland. From 1995 to 2008 she worked at the Dallas Museum of Art, where she became senior curator of painting and sculpture, then was appointed director at The Phillips Collection. She was also an independent curator for the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (de), the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Kosinski has published on artists including Gustave Courbet, Henri Matisse, and Vincent van Gogh and on various topics in nineteenth and twentieth-century art.

President Obama appointed her in 2012 to the National Council on the Humanities, an advisory council to the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a member of the US-China Forum on the Arts and Culture.